Hong Kong: People/Biography/Memoir

There were 145 foreign traders resident in Canton in 1831: 66 English, 52 Parsees (who were counted as British), total 118; 15 Americans, 3 Dutch, 3 Swedish, 1 French, 1 Swiss and 4 Spanish. Most of these were resident in Hong Kong within 15 years. They joined a small Chinese population of farmers and fishermen of mixed ethnic backgrounds. This chapter looks at the individuals of all origins who came to Hong Kong from Canton, Calcutta, Java, Persia, Armenia, Baghdad, Holland, and beyond – through specific studies, biographies and memoir.

Ho, Eric Peter. The Welfare League, The Sixty Years 1930-1990. A pamphlet held by HKU Library Special Collections (HKP 361.763 W46 zH). The Welfare League was formed specifically to provide aid and welfare to Hong Kong’s Eurasians and was thus a first public statement of the existence of a mixed race community.

Holdsworth, May. Foreign Devils. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
This records what May calls a pattern of ‘mutual incomprehension and distrust’ between Westerners and Chinese in HK, the European desire to segregate, the European District Reservation Ordinances for the Peak and Kowloon, and the Night Pass and Lantern laws. On pp. 186-192 she considers the idea that Eurasians are Hong Kong’s ‘only Indigenes’. Also discusses protected women, and the ‘charmed circle’ of the expatriate elite. She says yes Europeans were racist but so were Chinese.

Teng, Emma. Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China and Hong Kong, 1842-1943. University of California Press, 2013.
Teng studies how people saw mixed race identities and what was said about them – with some facts of racial mixing and resultant networks. She uses memoirs and archives to reconstruct the Eurasian experience in Shanghai, Hong Kong, California, New York, etc. Contents:
1. A Canton Mandarin Weds a Connecticut Yankee: Chinese-Western Intermarriage Becomes a ‘Problem’
2. Mae Watkins Becomes a ‘Real Chinese Wife’: Marital Expatriation, Migration, and Transracial Hybridity
3. ‘A Problem for Which There Is No Solution’: The New Hybrid Brood and the Specter of Degeneration in New York’s Chinatown
4. ‘Productive of Good to Both Sides’: The Eurasian as Solution in Chinese Utopian Visions of Racial Harmony
5. Reversing the Sociological Lens: Putting Sino-American “Mixed Bloods” on the Miscegenation Map
6. The ‘Peculiar Cast’: Navigating the American Color Line in the Era of Chinese Exclusion
7. On Not Looking Chinese: Chineseness as Consent or Descent?
8. ‘No Gulf between a Chan and a Smith amongst Us’: Charles Graham Anderson’s Manifesto for Eurasian Unity in Interwar Hong Kong.

attended by many Eurasian, Chinese and other students:— Celebrating 150 years of educational excellence/DGS, 2010.
— DGS Kowloon A Brief History 1860-1977.
— Quest, the DGS magazine
— DBS, 135th Anniversary, 2004
— The Diocesan Boys School and Orphanage Hongkong: the history and records 1869 to 1929, by W.T. Weatherstone, 1930.
— A Tribute to Rev Canon George She, headmaster 1955-1961, 2004.
— Wings, ‘sursum corda’: a souvenir magazine, 1937.
— To Serve and To Lead, a history of the DBS, 2009.
— Steps, the DBS magazine.

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ON MUI TSAI, ‘PROTECTED WOMEN’:

Cheng Po Hung. Early Prostitution in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery The University of Hong Kong, 2010.

Cheng Po Hung. Early Hong Kong Brothels. Hong Kong: University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong, 2003.

Jaschok, Maria. Concubines and Maidservants: A Social History. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, and London: Zed Books, 1988. This was a pioneering study of the phenomena of bonded women servants and their offspring. Jaschok studies specifically the Moot family, the role of the Comprador, the feelings of the women involved, the coercion and lack of choice, the purchase of women, competition between wives and concubines and much more. She then looks at the overall trade, exactly how it took place and where it left all the participants.

Jaschok, Maria and Miers, Suzanne, Editors. Women and Chinese Patriarchy – Submission, Servitude and Escape. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, and London: Zed Books, 1994.
For Hong Kong students, the most important chapters are: Chapter 3, pp. 45-77, by James Hayes: San Po Tsai (Little Daughters-in-Law) and Child Betrothals in the New Territories of Hong Kong from the 1890s to the 1960s; and, Chapter 7, pp. 141-171, by Dr Elizabeth Sinn: Chinese Patriarchy and the Protection of Women in 19th Century Hong Kong; and, Chapter 10, pp. 198-221, by Carl T Smith: Protected Women in 19th Century Hong Kong. Other chapters cover similar issues in mainland China, Singapore, San Francisco and the Perl River Delta.

Report of the Special Committee Appointed By His Excellency Sir William Robinson, &c., to Investigate and Report on Certain Points Connected With the Bill for the Incorporation of the Po Leung Kuk, or Society For the Protection of Women and Girls, Together with the Evidence Taken Before the Committee and an Appendix Containing Correspondence, Reports, Returns, &c. Hong Kong: Noronha, 1893.